Early last year, Cheng Wei, founder and chief executive of the Chinese ride-hailing juggernaut Didi Chuxing, tried to resist taking money from legendary investor Masayoshi Son. Cheng told the SoftBank Group chief he didn’t need the cash because his company had already raised $10 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Fine, Son said, then suggested he might direct his support to one of Didi’s rivals. Cheng relented and took the investment: $5 billion in the largest fundraising round ever for a tech startup.

Son pulled a similar maneuver in November, publicly warning Uber Technologies that if he didn’t get the deal he wanted, his backing would go to archrival Lyft. Uber also took the money in a $9 billion investment unveiled last week.

Masayoshi Son has been an unstoppable force in the technology world over the last year. As he lined up a roster of big backers—Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and Apple’s Tim Cook among them—for SoftBank’s planned $100 billion Vision Fund, Son took stakes in scores of businesses engaged in a dizzying array of activities: ride-hailing, chip-making, office-sharing, satellite-building, robot-making, even indoor kale-farming. 

Son’s idiosyncratic deal-making has confounded admirers and detractors for years. And the latest frenzy has been no exception. In deal after deal, according to people involved, Son pressed to meet founders face to face, encouraged them to take more money than they wanted and wielded his outsized checkbook as a weapon. Along the way, he rattled rivals with his growing influence and changed the game of startup investing -- for better or worse.

“There really isn’t a precedent for this,” says Steven Kaplan, a professor at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business who co-founded its entrepreneurship program. “The jury is still out on whether it will work.”

Son’s investment strategy defies easy categorization. He portrays himself as a true believer in the information revolution, a proponent of the so-called singularity—the notion that one day computers will mesh with human brains and bodies. But Son has skeptics aplenty. They wonder how ride-hailing fits with money management. Or what satellites have to do with indoor farming.

Son, 60, has made hundreds of investments since he founded SoftBank in 1981 and during the dot-com bubble was briefly the world’s richest man. But the vast majority of those deals failed, and Son’s reputation rests almost solely on one transaction: an investment in Alibaba Group Holding that started with $20 million in 2000.

SoftBank’s stake is now worth about 15.5 trillion yen ($138 billion), one of the most lucrative venture investments of all time. But many people think that was a fluke. Son got lucky one time. Can he do it again?

Son declined to comment for this story. A SoftBank spokesman said his track record of success goes well beyond Alibaba and includes investments in Sprint, Yahoo! and Supercell, the developer of games like Clash Royale.

‘One Billion Dollars Per Minute’

The latest deal-making spree began in September of 2016. Mohammed bin Salman, deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia at the time, flew to Tokyo as his country was looking for ways to diversify beyond oil. He met with Son, who pitched the idea of setting up the largest investment fund in history to finance technology startups. In less than an hour, bin Salman agreed to become the cornerstone investor. “Forty-five minutes, $45 billion,” Son said on The David Rubenstein Show in September. “One billion dollars per minute.”

Son didn't wait for the money to come in before starting to cut deals. He made about 100 investments last year with a total value of $36 billion, according to research firm Preqin. That's more in dollar terms than Silicon Valley’s top two heavyweights, Sequoia Capital and Silver Lake, combined.

More surprising given the numbers is that SoftBank is largely a one-man show when it comes to deals, despite its ranks of bankers from Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Lieutenants pitch Son ideas, but he makes the final decisions – and he generates plenty of his own. Tellingly, he is the only so-called key man in the Vision Fund, while most investment funds have several people with the influential designation. (Limited partners have the option to withdraw from a fund if any “key men” leave.)

 “It's 100 percent Masa,” says one CEO who agreed to sell Son a stake in his company. “Okay, 99.9 percent Masa.”

Son typically brings in his bankers when there’s a complex deal structure, like in the Uber deal. In that case, SoftBank bought most of its shares through a tender offer with tricky legal aspects because of a nasty board dispute and the many investors involved. 

The SoftBank spokesman said decisions are “made by the organization after due diligence and process.”

Son has an unusually personal approach. He often invites founders to Tokyo to talk face to face, conversing in English. He'll typically begin with a formal meeting in one of his conference rooms on SoftBank's 26th floor. Then Son, his guest and staff will move to the private dining area on the same floor, according to people who have attended the meetings. Visitors can wander in his garden or relax on traditional tatami mats. Son's personal chef prepares Japanese specialties. Big-screen TVs often play SoftBank Hawks baseball games. There’s little small talk though.

“He asks a lot of questions,” says Greg Wyler, the CEO of satellite provider OneWeb, which received a $1 billion SoftBank investment in December 2016. “If you like thinking really hard and really fast and you like thinking through the art of the possible, it's a wonderfully motivating experience.”

Son's staff does due diligence before he meets with startup founders. So he has a good sense of whether he wants to invest before the meeting starts. His questions are usually focused on prodding founders to think more broadly about opportunities.

Eugene Izhikevich was invited to Tokyo in May. A prominent Russian neuroscientist who lives in San Diego, he runs a startup that builds brains for robots. Izhikevich pitched Son on investing “tens of millions” so his company could develop robots that would find widespread use in a decade or two. “He interrupted me in the middle of my presentation and said, ‘I got it,’” Izhikevich says. “How much do you need to achieve your vision?”

The Russian realized Son wanted to give him more money than he was requesting—on the condition that Izhikevich accelerate his work. Son didn't want to wait 10 or 20 years. He wanted a full range of robots in three to five years. “Robots everywhere, that's the vision we share,” Izhikevich says. “What drives me crazy is how slow things are. In Masa, I found my match.”

In July, SoftBank announced a $114 million investment in Izhikevich's Brain Corp. The Russian appreciates the money, but admits he now feels the pressure of living up to Son's expectations. 

Son is largely hands-off after cutting a check, though he stays in touch with founders by phone and email. He sits on the boards of a handful of companies, including Sprint, Alibaba and ARM Holdings, the chipmaker he acquired in 2016 for $32 billion in the biggest deal of his career. He did get deeply involved in the operations of Sprint as that company struggled.

While some question the wisdom of giving entrepreneurs more cash than they're looking for, there's another way to look at Son's 2017 Blitzkrieg. He's gotten SoftBank big stakes in more than a dozen of the most prominent startups in the world, including the two most valuable (Uber and Didi). In the process, he's shown he can help entrepreneurs chase ambitious, expensive dreams with a single check. “For all of the founders I work with, he is now the first name on their list,” says Mark Tluszcz, who co-founded the venture firm Mangrove Capital Partners.

Doubters from the Get-Go

Son has faced skeptics his entire life. He grew up on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, bullied as a child because of his Korean ancestry. His father more than made up for the abuse, doting on his son and praising him as a genius for his business acumen. Son left Japan at 16 to study in the U.S. and launched his career as an entrepreneur while at the University of California at Berkeley. He brought Space Invaders game machines from Japan to the U.S. and invented an electronic translator that he sold for about $1 million.

Son likes to talk about how he proved doubters wrong after returning to Japan to build his empire. He made early investments in Yahoo! and Yahoo Japan, as well as Alibaba. He took over Vodafone's Japanese wireless operation when everyone thought the business was hopeless and, by persuading Steve Jobs to give him exclusive rights to the first iPhone in Japan, turned it into a fierce competitor.

He stumbled plenty, too. During the dot-com boom, Son was one of the most enthusiastic investors—backing more than 800 startups to create what he called a “netbatsu,” the digital-age equivalent of Japan’s zaibatsu conglomerates. But with the crash, almost all those companies failed. Son had the distinction of losing more money than anyone else ever had—$70 billion.

Son doesn't use the same term these days, but what he's assembling resembles his old netbatsu. He describes the people at the startups he’s backing  as “comrades” and how they're part of the broader SoftBank Group. He talks about opportunities for SoftBank-backed companies to collaborate – even when all they have in common is his money.

Chris Lane, an analyst with Sanford Bernstein, says about eight in 10 of the investors he talks with are skeptical of Son. They see him as a solid telecom operator who is taking enormous risks with his investments and has demonstrated no special skill in technology investment. Lane sees clear evidence of that disbelief: SoftBank’s stock in Alibaba and other assets are worth more than 19 trillion yen after subtracting all its debt, but SoftBank’s market cap is only 9.8 trillion yen. It’s like your neighbor having a suitcase stuffed with $1 million in cash, but you'll only pay him $500,000 for it because you think he'll lose the rest on the way to your house. Critics not only don't believe Son can pick the next Alibaba; they're convinced he's going to squander what he already has.

“If you think of this as a telco making unrelated investments and likely to lose money, then maybe the discount is right,” Lane says. “If you think this is a sophisticated technology investment firm with a strong track record, then this is an unbelievable opportunity.”

Lane initiated coverage of SoftBank in October with a buy rating because he’s a believer – he sees Son as the Warren Buffett of the tech industry. But since then, the discount from Son’s assets to his market value has widened from 41 percent to almost 50 percent.

Son has talked about the discount regularly on investor calls, sounding frustrated at times and elated at others. In May, he compared SoftBank to the goose that lays golden eggs, arguing his company doesn’t get credit for its eggs much less the goose itself. “The goose has more value than the golden eggs. I don’t know how you don’t think this,’’ he said, then later added, “if you ask me, it's better to be undervalued because it leaves room for growth.”

The Uber Test

Perhaps no Son investment is more important to his reputation than the one in Uber. The SoftBank chief is betting heavily on Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi, who has pledged to repair a toxic culture, overcome regulatory pushback and take on mounting competition before leading Uber to a successful IPO. “This is a critical test for SoftBank and whether they can deploy large amounts of money in late-stage investments,” Lane says. “The market will judge [Son] by the Uber IPO.”

Son holds a potentially commanding position. SoftBank has stakes in the biggest ride-hailing startups in the U.S., China, India, Brazil and Southeast Asia. Four of the SoftBank-backed startups compete with each other, including in key markets like India and Indonesia. So Son may encourage the rivals to make peace, merging operations in certain countries to save billions in subsidies for drivers and customers. For example, Grab, the largest ride-hailing service in Southeast Asia, may acquire much of Uber's operation in the region, according to a person familiar with the matter. Didi could also move to acquire Grab to accelerate its expansion beyond China.

But there's a limit to what Son can do. He doesn't hold controlling stakes in any of the companies, including Uber and Grab. So he can't force them into deals if management or other investors resist, but he may help them see their own economic interests. “SoftBank will do its best to eliminate unhealthy competition,” says Bernstein's Lane.

Longer term, Son will have to do a better job articulating how his deals fit together. At the company's annual shareholders meeting in June, he closed with an awkward video the company has used for years to explain its view of technology’s future. It opens with a blond man wandering among stone ruins. “Sorrow is inherent to the human condition,” he says, staring into the camera. “Since the beginning of time, humans have sought to overcome sorrow.” The clip goes on to explain how technology will connect people on opposites sides of the world and allow them to share thoughts and ideas. It closes with the man wading through a field of waist-high grass. “Together we'll open the doors to a new century of happiness and joy,” he says. Bafflement ensued.

Even as his allies describe it, Son's vision seems like garden-variety optimism about a technological future that has been enunciated by many industry leaders: a trillion connected devices, generating data that will be analyzed by artificial intelligence to supposedly make the world a better place.

At a SoftBank conference in July, Son took the time to answer critics who say Alibaba is his sole success. He flashed a slide citing his other successful deals and another showing his investments have returned 44 percent annually including Alibaba—and 42 percent without it.

“You may think, ‘you were lucky because you hit upon Alibaba,’” he said. “That’s true. I'm really, really grateful to Jack Ma. It was not just one lucky hit. Perhaps if you continue with lucky hits then it's your capability. Maybe I'm smart after all!’’

Or maybe just too powerful to ignore. 

Anthony Tan, who co-founded the Grab taxi-hailing service, recalls first meeting Son a few years ago when the Japanese billionaire was considering investing in his startup. As the two chatted, Son mentioned his early support for Ma, then an unknown school teacher who is now the richest man in China. “Years ago, Jack Ma sat there,” Tan recalls Son telling him. “Anthony-san, you take my money. It's good for you. It's good for me. If you don't take my money, not so good for you.”

Like so many others before and since, Tan took Son’s money.

— With assistance by Yoolim Lee

We're excited to share that the buddybuild team has joined the Xcode engineering group at Apple to build amazing developer tools for the entire iOS community.

We've always been proud to be a Canadian company, so we're also pleased that we will be staying right here in Vancouver — a hotbed of developer and engineering talent.

The buddybuild service will remain available to existing customers to build, test, and ship iOS apps to testers through buddybuild.com.

As of today, we are no longer accepting new customers. Existing Free Starter plans and Android app development will be discontinued on March 1, 2018. 

If you have questions about an existing account, please contact us at: team@buddybuild.com.

When Java was first introduced, mainstream programming languages mostly either compiled to standalone executables (e.g. C/C++, COBOL), or else ran in an interpreter (e.g. Perl, Tcl). For many programmers, Java’s need for both a bytecode compiler and a runtime interpreter was a shift in thought. The compilation model made Java better suited for business programming than “scripting” languages. Yet the runtime model required a suitable JVM to be deployed and available on each target machine.

People bristled at this somewhat (at least I remember doing so!). Early web forums, and later StackOverflow questions, were full of developers looking for some way to ship their Java applications as “native” executables. To avoid the need for a Java runtime to be installed on the target machine prior to deployment.

There have been solutions from nearly the beginning. Excelsior JET is an ahead-of-time (AOT) Java compiler, providing a more-or-less C++ style experience. However, with licensing costs in the thousands of dollars, it has always been a niche option. On the free-as-in-beer end, there is Launch4j, and JDK 8’s javapackager tool. These allow you to bundle a Java Runtime Environment, with a launcher executable for starting your app with that JRE. However, embedding a JRE adds roughly 200 megabytes. It’s difficult to trim that down, due to technical reasons as well as tricky licensing issues.

The most publicized new feature in Java 9 is the new modularization system, known asProject Jigsaw. The full scope of this warrants many blog articles, if not complete books. However, in a nutshell, the new module system is about isolating chunks of code and their dependencies.

This applies not only for external libraries, but even the Java standard library itself. Meaning that your application can declare which parts of the standard library it really needs, and potentiallyexclude all the other parts.

This potential is realized through the jlink tool thatnow ships with the JDK. At a superficial first glance, jlink is similar to javapackager. It generates a bundle, consisting of:

1. your application code and dependencies,
2. an embedded Java Runtime Environment, and
3. a native launcher (i.e. bash script or Windows batch file) for launching your application with the embedded JRE.
   

However, jlink establishes “link time” as a new optional phase, in between compile-time and run-time, for performing optimizations such as removing unreachable code. Meaning that unlike javapackager, which bundles the entire standard library, jlinkbundles a stripped-down JRE with only those modules that your application needs.

The difference between jlink and it’s older alternatives is striking. To illustrate, let’s look at a sample project:

https://github.com/steve-perkins/jlink-demo

(1) Create a modularized project

This repo contains a multi-project Gradle build. The cli subdirectory is a “Hello World” command-line application, while gui is a JavaFX desktop app. For both, notice that the build.gradle file configures each project for Java 9 compatibility with this line:

sourceCompatibility = 1.9

This, along with creating a module-info.java file, sets up each project for modularization.

/cli/src/main/java/module-info.java:

module cli {
}

/gui/src/main/java/module-info.java:

module gui {
    requires javafx.graphics;
    requires javafx.controls;

    exports gui;
}

Our CLI application is just a glorified System.out.println() call, so it depends only on thejava.base module (which is always implicit, and needs no declaration).

Not all applications use JavaFX, however, so our GUI app must declare its dependency on thejavafx.graphics and javafx.controls modules. Moreover, because of the way that JavaFX works, the low-level library needs access to our code. So the module’s exports gui line grants this visibility to itself.

It’s going to take some time for Java developers (myself included!) to get a feel for the new standard library modules and what they contain. The JDK includes a jdeps tool that can help with this. However, once a project is setup for modularization, IntelliJ is great at recognizing missing declarations and helping auto-complete them. I assume that if Eclipse and NetBeans don’t have similar support already, then they soon will.

(2) Build an executable JAR

To build a deployable bundle with jlink, you first want to package up your application into an executable JAR file. If your project has third-party library dependencies, then you’ll want to use your choice of “shaded” or “fat-JAR” plugins to generate a single JAR with all dependencies included. In this case, our examples use only the standard library. So building an executable JAR is a simple matter of telling Gradle’s jar plugin to include a META-INF/MANIFEST.MF file declaring the executable class:

jar {
    manifest {
        attributes 'Main-Class': 'cli.Main'
    }
}

(3) Run jlink on it

As far as I know, Gradle does not yet have a plugin offering clean and seemless integration withjlink. So my build scripts use an Exec task to run the tool in a completely separate process. It should be easy to follow, such that you can tell the command-line invocation would look like this:

[JAVA_HOME]/bin/jlink --module-path libs:[JAVA_HOME]/jmods --add-modules cli --launcher cli=cli/cli.Main --output dist --strip-debug --compress 2 --no-header-files --no-man-pages

• The --module-path flag is analogous to the traditional CLASSPATH. It declares where the tool should look for compiled module binaries (i.e. JAR files, or the new JMOD format). Here, we tell it to look in the project’s libs subdirectory (because that’s where Gradle puts our executable JAR), and in the JDK directory for the standard library modules.

• The --add-modules flag declares which modules to add to the resulting bundle. We only need to declare our own project modules (cli or gui), because the modules that it depends on will be pulled in as transitive dependencies.

• The resulting bundle will include a /bin subdirectory, with a bash script or Windows batch file for executing your application. The --launcher flag allows you to specify a name for this script, and which Java class it should invoke (which seems a bit redundant as this is already specified in the an executable JAR). Above, we are saying to create a script named bin/cli, which will invoke the class cli.Main in module cli.

• The --output flag, intuitively enough, specifies a subdirectory in which to place the resulting bundle. Here, we are using a target directory named dist.

• These final flags, --strip-debug, --compress 2, --no-header-files, and --no-man-pages, are some optimizations I’ve tinkered with to further reduce the resulting bundle size.

At the project root level, this Gradle command builds and links both sub-projects:

./gradlew linkAll

The resulting deployable bundles can be found at:

[PROJECT_ROOT]/cli/build/dist
[PROJECT_ROOT]/gui/build/dist

Let’s take a took at size of our linked CLI and GUI applications, with their stripped-down embedded JRE’s:

This is on a Windows machine, with a 64-bit JRE (Linux sizes are a bit larger, but still roughly proportionate). Some notes:

• For comparison, the full JRE on this platform is 203 megabytes.

• A “Hello World” CLI written in Go compiles to around 2 MB. Hugo, the website generator used to publish this blog, is a 27.2 megabyte Go executable.

• For cross-platform GUI development, a typical Qt or GTK application ships with around 15 megs of Windows DLL’s for the GUI functionality alone. Plus any other shared libs, for functionality that Java provides in its base standard library. TheElectron quick-start example produces a 131 MB deliverable.

To be fair, an application bundle with a launch script is not quite as clean as “just building an .EXE”, and having a single monolithic file. Also, the JRE is comparatively sluggish at startup, as its JIT compiler warms up.

Even so, Java is now at a place where you can ship self-contained, zero-dependency applications that are comparable in size to other compiled languages (and superior to web-hybrid options like Electron). Also, Java 9 includes an experimental AOT compiler, that might eliminate sluggish startup. While only available for 64-bit Linux initially, this jaotc tool will hopefully soon expand to other platforms.

Although Go has been very high-profile in the early wave of cloud infrastructure CLI tools (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes,Consul, Vault, etc)… Java is becoming a strong alternative, especially for shops with established Java experience. For cross-platform desktop GUI apps, I would argue that JavaFX combined with Java 9 modularization is hands-down the best choice available today.

ON JANUARY 2nd, at 8pm local time, a strange vessel weighed anchor and sailed out of the Port of Durban, in South Africa, heading east. Her hull was orange. Her superstructure bristled with antennas—some long and pointy, some sleek, white and domed. Her stern sported a crane and also a strange gantry, known to her crew as the “stinger”. Her bow looked so huge and ungainly as to be on the point of tipping her, nose first, into the depths. And below deck, invisible to the casual observer, she carried eight autonomous submarines called HUGINs, each six metres long, weighing 1,800kg, and containing a titanium sphere to protect the sensitive electronics therein from the pressure of the ocean’s depths.

The strange ship’s name is Seabed Constructor. She is a Norwegian research vessel, built in 2014 and owned by Swire Seabed, a dredging and surveying firm in Bergen. At the moment, though, she is leased to Ocean Infinity, a company based in Houston, Texas. And the task Ocean Infinity has hired her for is a hard one: to find whatever is left of flight MH370, a Boeing 777-200ER that left Kuala Lumpur on March 8th 2014 with 239 people on board and vanished over the Indian Ocean.

The disappearance of MH370 is one of the great mysteries of modern civil aviation. The aircraft was bound for Beijing, but changed course suddenly over the South China Sea and broke off radio contact. It was last detected by radar near the northern tip of Sumatra, heading west-north-west into the open ocean. Subsequent connections to a communications satellite suggested that it crashed somewhere along an arc 1,500km west of Australia.

The search that followed was the largest in aviation history. It was mounted by Fugro, a Dutch firm, and paid for by the Malaysian, Chinese and Australian governments. Over the course of three years Fugro managed to scan 120,000 square kilometres of seabed. But it found nothing. The plan is for Ocean Infinity’s search to be paid for, on a “no find, no fee” basis, by Malaysia alone. Contracts have yet to be signed, but Oliver Plunkett, Ocean Infinity’s boss, has decided to go ahead anyway, to take advantage of the window of good weather that opens in the southern Indian Ocean in January and February.

Ocean Infinity aims to cover the ground much faster than Fugro did. In prior cruises in the Atlantic, the firm has, according to Josh Broussard, its technical director, managed to scan 890 square kilometres a day using six autonomous submarines. With eight, Mr Broussard thinks that the new mission will be able to manage 1,200 a day—enough to have covered the original search area in just 100 days.

The new search area, 25,000 square kilometres of sea floor chosen by investigators from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), is just north of the old one (see map). Fugro could infer MH370’s crash site only from its final, rather shaky, communication signals. Ocean Infinity’s effort has been guided as well by wreckage washed ashore on the coasts of Madagascar, Mozambique and Réunion—hence the more northerly starting point. Seabed Constructor will reach the starting-point of the search, about 35°S off the coast of Western Australia, on or about January 17th, her crew having conducted a few final tests and calibrations of the HUGIN system en route, using remote-controlled robots to place dummy debris on the sea floor in order to see if the subs can find it. If searching the patch of ocean designated by the ATSB reveals nothing, then the ship will head further north, towards the 30th parallel, which some independent experts believe is a better bet.

Rolling in the deep
Fugro’s search used but a single autonomous submarine, and this was unable to dive below 4,000 metres, meaning it was not always close to the seabed. The HUGINs carried by Seabed Constructor can, however, go as deep as 6,000 metres. That permits them to reach most of the sea floor comfortably. And the fact that there are eight of them means different areas can be searched in parallel, and that some submarines will always be at sea.

The HUGINs will be launched by the stinger, which extends out over the ship’s stern. Once underwater, the robot craft will communicate with the ship using an acoustic modem. The ship’s own modem, which will receive these signals, is fixed to the end of a long pole that extends down through her hull into the water.

Each HUGIN comes with a 300kg lithium-polymer battery pack, good for a tour of duty lasting up to 60 hours. A downward-pointing sonar will map the contours of the seabed beneath the craft, but most of the searching will be done by side-mounted sonars scanning the bed on either side of the craft. These send out pings and measure the intensity with which they are reflected. Sand reflects less sound than metal does, meaning metal objects such as aircraft debris are easy to distinguish. And if something apparently metallic is detected, its nature can be confirmed using an on-board magnetometer.

The HUGINs’ search patterns are set by people, but the craft will actually navigate with little reference to their mother ship. Every so often, the ship will send out a corrective ping to keep them on course. Mostly, however, they will employing dead reckoning, based on data from accelerometers, to steer themselves autonomously. They are also capable of picking their way without assistance over sheer underwater cliffs and mountains, past crevices and gullies, using on-board cameras and machine-vision software.

After its tour of duty, a HUGIN will be lifted back on-board ship and the data it has collected (up to two terabytes, recorded on a waterproof hard drive) downloaded into the ship’s data centre and turned into human-readable maps, a process that takes six hours. The HUGIN’s battery will be replaced with a fully charged one, any necessary repairs made, and the craft then sent back out into the ocean.

A team of geologists and hydrographers will then pore over the maps, looking for signs of the missing plane. Surprisingly, for such a high-tech operation, this stage of the search will be entirely manual. Every block of sea floor that the HUGINs map will be examined by three sets of human eyes. Together, this survey team will come up with a list of possible targets, ranked from “E” to “A” (“nothing” to “that’s it”), to present to their bosses. If the data look good, a HUGIN will be sent down for a second, closer look, cameras at the ready.

What happens next, if Ocean Infinity does locate what is left of the missing aircraft, is unclear. Friends and relatives of those aboard it will doubtless find relief from knowing where the flight ended up. But merely finding the wreckage will not explain what happened on board the plane. That will require the discovery of the aircraft’s flight recorder.

That object is therefore Ocean Infinity’s ultimate target. If the firm finds it on this mission, Mr Broussard says they plan to bring it to the surface and then deliver it for analysis to the Australian authorities, who have the technical competence to assess it. A follow-up trip to examine the wreckage, and even bring it to the surface, would require further authorisation from the Malaysian government.

Seabed Constructor is the most advanced civilian survey vessel on the planet today. If its array of technology cannot find MH370, then it is likely that nothing will, and that the mystery of MH370 may never be solved. Either way, though, the advance of technology may mean that it is the last such mystery. As the oceans are watched with ever closer scrutiny, from space and the depths, it is increasingly difficult for anything to get lost in the first place.

(Reuters) - Music streaming company Spotify was sued by Wixen Music Publishing Inc last week for allegedly using thousands of songs, including those of Tom Petty, Neil Young and the Doors, without a license and compensation to the music publisher.

Wixen, an exclusive licensee of songs such as “Free Fallin” by Tom Petty, “Light My Fire” by the Doors, (Girl We Got a) Good Thing by Weezer and works of singers such as Stevie Nicks, is seeking damages worth at least $1.6 billion along with injunctive relief.

Spotify failed to get a direct or a compulsory license from Wixen that would allow it to reproduce and distribute the songs, Wixen said in the lawsuit, filed in a California federal court.

Wixen also alleged that Spotify outsourced its work to a third party, licensing and royalty services provider the Harry Fox Agency, which was “ill-equipped to obtain all the necessary mechanical licenses”.

Spotify declined to comment.

In May, the Stockholm, Sweden-based company agreed to pay more than $43 million to settle a proposed class action alleging it failed to pay royalties for some of the songs it makes available to users.

Spotify, which is planning a stock market listing this year, has grown around 20 percent in value to at least $19 billion in the past few months.

It is real struggle to work with a new language, especially if the type doesn’t resemble what you have previously seen. I have been there with Go and lost my interest in the language when it first came out due to the reason I was pretending it is something I already knew.

Go is considered as an object-oriented language even though it lacks type hierarchy. It has an unconventional type system. It is expected to do the things differently in this language given the traditional paradigms are not always going to help the Go users. This article contains a few gotchas.

Program flow first, types later

In Go, program flow and behavior are not tightly coupled to the abstractions. You don’t start programming by thinking about the types but rather the flow/behavior. As you need to represent your data in more sophisticated ways, you start introducing your types.

More recently Rob Pike shared his thoughts on the separation of data and behavior:

… the more important idea is the separation of concept: data and behavior are two distinct concepts in Go, not conflated into a single notion of “class”. – Rob Pike

Go has a strong emphasis on the data model. Structs (which are aggregate types) provide a light-weight way to represent data. The lack of type hierarchy helps structs to keep being thin, structs never represent the layers and layers of inherited behavior but only the data fields. This makes them closer to the data structures they represent rather than the behavior they are additionally providing.

Embedding is not inheritance

Code reuse is not provided by type hierarchy but via composition. Language ecosystems with classical inheritance is often suffering from excessive level of indirection and premature abstractions based on inheritance which later makes the code complicated and unmaintainable.

Instead of providing type hierarchy, Go allows composition and dispatching of the methods via interfaces. The language allows embedding and most people assume the language has some limited support for sub-classing types – this is not true.

Embedding is really not very different than having a regular field but allows you to embed the methods on the embedded type directly into the new type.

Consider the following struct:

type File struct {
    sync.Mutex
    rw io.ReadWriter
}

Then, File objects will directly have access to sync.Mutex methods:

f := File{}
f.Lock()

It is no different than providing Lock and Unlock methods from File and make them operate on a sync.Mutex field. This is not sub-classing.

Polymorphism

Due to lack of sub-classing, polymorphism in Go is achieved only with interfaces. Methods are dispatched during runtime depending on the concrete type.

var r io.Reader

r = bytes.NewBufferString("hello")

buf := make([]byte, 2048)
if _, err := r.Read(buf); err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}

Above, r.Read will be dispatched to (*Buffer).Read.

Please note that embedding is not sub-classing, embedding types can not be assigned to what they are embedding. The following code is not going to compile:

type Animal struct {}

type Dog struct {
	Animal
}


func main() {
	var a Animal
	a = Dog{}
}

No explicit interface implementations

Go doesn’t have an implements that explicitly allowing you to tell you are implementing an interface. It assumes you are implementing an interface if the method signature matches the one in the interface definition.

How does this scale? Is it possible to accidentally implement interfaces you didn’t mean to implement? Although mechanically possibly, it has never been an issue for our user base to pass an implementation of one interface mistakenly for another one. Interfaces often are widely different, or it is sign there might not be a need of a second interface if two interfaces are quite similar.

We have a culture of not introducing new interfaces but prefer to use the ones provided by the standard library or use the established ones from the community. This culture also reduces the number of similar looking interfaces.

No header files or no culture of “let’s introduce interfaces first”. If you don’t want to provide multiple implementations of the same high-level behavior, you don’t introduce interfaces.

Naming patterns based on other languages’ dependency inversion conventions are anti-patterns in Go. Naming styles such the following don’t fit into the Go ecosystem.

type Banana interface {
    //...
}
type BananaImpl struct {}

One more thing… Go prefer small interfaces. You can always embed interfaces later but you cannot decompose large ones.

No constructors

Go doesn’t have constructors hence doesn’t allow you to override the default constructor. Default construction always result in zero-valued fields.

Go has a philosophy to use zero-value to represent the default. Utilize zero-value as much as possible to provide the default behavior.

Some structs may require more work such as validation,opening a connection, etc before becoming useful to the user. In such cases, we prefer initialization functions.

func NewRequest(method, url string, body io.Reader) (*Request, error)

NewRequest validates method and url, sets up the right internals to read from the given body and returns a request.

Nil receivers

Nil is a value, nil value of a type can implement behavior. Developers don’t have to provide concrete types for noop implementations.

If you are introducing an interface, only to provide a noop implementation of your concrete type, don’t do it.

Below, event logging will be a noop for the nil values.

type Event struct {}

func (e *Event) Log(msg string) {
    if e == nil {
        return
    }
    // Log the msg on the event...
}

Then user can use the nil value for the noop behavior:

var e *Event
e.Log("this is a message")

No generics

Go doesn’t have generics.

There are ongoing conversations happening on what kind of generics would be a good fit for Go. Given the unique type system, it is not easy to just copy an existing approach and assume it will be useful for the majority and will be orthogonal to the existing language features.Go Experience Reports are waiting for user input to see what kind of use cases could have helped the Go users if Go had generics.

BEIJING—China’s biggest tech giants are working with authorities to create digital identifications as alternatives to the state-issued ID cards citizens must present to obtain many public and private services, such as boarding trains and checking into hotels.

The development underscores Beijing’s increasing reliance on its big tech companies as it seeks to use the latest digital tools and capabilities to monitor its population.

What was India discussing on Hacker News in 2017?

HN was not just discussing startups and discoveries in technology and science, but culture, arts and politics as well.

India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

India Banned Literally All Disposable Plastic in Delhi, a Major Win for Planet Earth

The Greening of Kashmir – short – Canon 7D from Tim Silverwood on Vimeo.

Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Supreme Court in Unanimous Verdict

(I) Privacy has both positive and negative content. The negative content restrains the state from committing an intrusion upon the life and personal liberty of a citizen. Its positive content imposes an obligation on the state to take all necessary measures to protect the privacy of the individual.

India, Once a Coal Goliath, Is Fast Turning Green

India’s IT industry laid off more than 56k employees this year

H-1B visas do mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

Accounts of girl raised by monkeys in India questioned

There’s a New Kind of Birth Control for Men

Doctors are on the cusp of launching the first new male contraceptive in more than a century. But rather than a Big Pharma lab, the breakthrough is emerging from a university startup in the heart of rural India.

The ancient game that saved a village

On a chess board you are fighting, as we are also fighting the hardships in our daily life

First-degree murder charge filed in possible hate crime shooting at Austins bar in Olathe

Lychee identified as cause for mystery deadly childhood illness

India floats the idea of a universal basic income

Gut microbial degradation of organophosphate insecticides-induces glucose intolerance via gluconeogenesis

India unveils $2.5 billion plan to electrify all households by end 2018

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday launched a $2.5 billion project to electrify all of the country’s households by the end of 2018.

IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

The man who ‘discovered’ 780 languages

When Ganesh Devy, a former professor of English, embarked on a search for India’s languages, he expected to walk into a graveyard, littered with dead and dying mother tongues.

Instead, he says, he walked into a “dense forest of voices”, a noisy Tower of Babel in one of the world’s most populous nations.

The East India Company: The original corporate raiders | William Dalrymple

Launch HN: Wifi Dabba (YC W17) – Low-Cost Wifi in India | Hacker News

Wifi Dabba provides super cheap, super fast internet at tea-stalls and bakeries in Bangalore, India. We built Wifi Dabba because mobile data is still expensive and also because getting wifi at the local bakery is just downright cool. We focussed on chai wallahs and bakeries because they’re everywhere and practically everyone in India gets chai at least once a day from these stalls. We have 3 plans, Rs.2 for 100mb, Rs.10 for 500mb & Rs.20 for 20GB (edit: whoops, that should say 1GB. Someday we’ll hit that low of a rate!). We don’t have any free trials or ads because we think the Rs.2 price point is something that everyone can afford. We’ve got 100 locations so far, if you’re reading this from Bangalore, check out our coverage map on http://www.wifidabba.com to try us out at a bakery near you. Our grand plan is to have Bangalore totally covered by the end of this year.

The best meal you can buy for 13 cents

Computer scientist Viral Shah helped build Julia from Bengaluru, India

GCP arrives in India with launch of Mumbai region

Modi Takes a Leap With India’s Biggest-Ever Tax Overhaul

Tea Tuesday: Meet The Chai Wallahs Of India

On virtually every other street corner, in every city or town or village in India, there is a chai wallah — a tea vendor who supplies the piping hot, milky brew that fuels the country.

Indian IT, “You’re Fired!”! but our Chairman is sorry about the way we fired you | LinkedIn

Life Aboard the Longest Train Ride Through India

If you pay attention, you can engage with the pure joy of traveling. For me, it is the feeling of being united with all our differences.
MATTHIEU PALEY

The Indian government is about to endorse giving all its citizens free money

Amazon Is Asking Indians To Hand Over Their Aadhaar, India’s Controversial Biometric ID, To Track Lost Packages

Show EVMs can be hacked, EC throws open challenge

Why many Indian politicians have a criminal record

A penchant for criminality is an electoral asset in India, the world’s biggest democracy

Google for India: Building India-first products and features

In Its Third Month, India’s Cash Shortage Begins to Bite

Inside the TalkTalk ‘scam call centre’

India is preparing to land on the moon for the first time in the country’s history

Amazon, in hunt for lower prices, recruits Indian merchants

The drink Brits go to bed with and Indians wake up with

“Comforting, warming, fortifying since 1906,” is written on the promotional mug Horlicks launched in the UK last year.

India’s Forgotten Stepwells

India freaks out over U.S. plans to change H-1B high-skilled visas

Kicking off Stripe’s private beta in India

One Year After India Killed Off Cash, Here’s What Other Countries Should Learn from It

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There are 400M people living in Indian cities today, but only 200M of them get reliable access to the public utility water. The other half have to buy private water, often from water trucks!

Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India that uses Audio QR to transfer money

Bill to Legalize Marijuana Cleared for Parliament

Visitors risk death if they step foot on mysterious tribe’s island

San Francisco university lays off IT workers, jobs head to India

India demonetisation fails to purge black money

Apple has started production of iPhone SE in India, shipping to customers later in May

Aadhaar: Ushering in a Commercialized Era of Surveillance in India

India’s Ambassador car brand sold

Ask HN: Xray cost – USA $200 (13000 INR), India 1000 INR – what causes 10x diff? | Hacker News

Trump and Sessions plan to restrict highly skilled foreign workers. Hyderabad says to bring it on.

Launch HN: Cashfree (YC S17) – Automated Payouts and Bank Transfers for India | Hacker News

Cashfree is India’s first payments platform that automates inbound and outbound bank transfers. This replaces the slow, error prone alternative of uploading Excel files for bulk payments or manually reconciling payments received via bank transfers. Using Cashfree, payouts that took more than a day to process, happen instantly and independent of banking hours.

How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers

In response to two different RTI applications, the government mentioned two different numbers with respect the number of blocked URLs/websites. In both cases, the government refused to disclose the list of URLs.

India’s Bad Debt Is Looking Better to Investors

rQuery – All new exciting script · Razorpay

Launch HN: Piggy (YC S17) – Investment App for India | Hacker News

The app has quick online account setup, easy to use interface, built in user support (in app chat, email and call). Users can access all the fund houses in a single app. Transactions cost less than $10 a year and there are options for lowering that cost. The app charges a flat fee of 50 cents per buy transaction. We take no hidden commissions from asset management firms, unlike most services in India. Saved commissions mean higher returns for our users.

India will ban driverless cars in order to protect jobs

India’s Nuclear Scientists Keep Dying Mysteriously 2013

India is rolling out trains with solar-powered coaches that’ll save thousands of litres of diesel

On July 14, Indian Railways rolled out its first train with rooftop solar panels that power the lights, fans, and information display systems inside passenger coaches. Although the train will still be pulled by a diesel-powered locomotive, a set of 16 solar panels atop each coach will replace the diesel generators that typically power these appliances. The railways estimate that a train with six solar-powered coaches could save around 21,000 litres of diesel every year, worth around Rs12 lakh.

India’s big data hunt for cures to its mental, ageing-related diseases | FactorDaily

The 300 million Indians older than 60 years by 2050 will owe it big time to a team of scientists, psychiatrists, and local health professionals in Kolar today. It is prospecting for gold of a different kind: data on how Indians grow old.

First-ever fiber optic cable connecting the USA with 3 BRICS countries

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Allergan Pulls A Fast One

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95% engineers in India unfit for software development jobs: study

Show HN: Credy – Peer-to-Peer Lending Platform for India

Refinance credit card bill, handle an emergency or pay for a professional course – whatever your need, Credy is here to help. Avail fast personal loans at reasonable rates. Save time with a digitized online process. Enjoy the new way to get personal loans.

Apple ‘to start making iPhones in India’

India’s workhorse rocket fails for the first time in decades

IT’S AN UNEXPECTED FAILURE FOR A FAIRLY RELIABLE ROCKET

McDonalds India is leaking 2.2 million users data – Hacker Noon

Fired Tech Workers Turn to Chatbots for Counseling

Made redundant by automation, thousands of workers are embracing the convenience, anonymity and affordability of online therapy.

India’s push to broaden use of its biometric database

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I receive a fair amount of email from strangers. My email address is public, which doesn’t seem to be a popular choice these days, but I’ve received enough inspiring correspondence over the years to leave it be.

When I receive a GPG encrypted email from a stranger, though, I immediately get the feeling that I don’t want to read it. Sometimes I actually contemplate creating a filter for them so that they bypass my inbox entirely, but for now I sigh, unlock my key, start reading, and – with a faint glimmer of hope – am typically disappointed.

I didn’t start out thinking this way. After all, my website even has my GPG key posted under my email address. It’s a feeling that has slowly crept up on me over the past decade, but I didn’t immediately understand where it came from. There’s no obvious unifying theme to the content of these emails, and they’re always written in earnest – not spam, or some form of harassment.

Eventually I realized that when I receive a GPG encrypted email, it simply means that the email was written by someone who would voluntarily use GPG. I don’t mean someone who cares about privacy, because I think we all care about privacy. There just seems to be something particular about people who try GPG and conclude that it’s a realistic path to introducing private communication in their lives for casual correspondence with strangers.

Increasingly, it’s a club that I don’t want to belong to anymore.

A philosophical dead end

In 1997, at the dawn of the internet’s potential, the working hypothesis for privacy enhancing technology was simple: we’d develop really flexible power tools for ourselves, and then teach everyone to be like us. Everyone sending messages to each other would just need to understand the basic principles of cryptography.

GPG is the result of that origin story. Instead of developing opinionated software with a simple interface, GPG was written to be as powerful and flexible as possible. It’s up to the user whether the underlying cipher is SERPENT or IDEA or TwoFish. The GnuPG man page is over sixteen thousand words long; for comparison, the novel Fahrenheit 451 is only 40k words.

Worse, it turns out that nobody else found all this stuff to be fascinating. Even though GPG has been around for almost 20 years, there are only ~50,000 keys in the “strong set,” and less than 4 million keys have ever been published to the SKS keyserver pool ever. By today’s standards, that’s a shockingly small user base for a month of activity, much less 20 years.

A technology dead end

In addition to the design philosophy, the technology itself is also a product of that era. As Matthew Green hasnoted, “poking through an OpenPGP implementation is like visiting a museum of 1990s crypto.” The protocol reflects layers of cruft built up over the 20 years that it took for cryptography (and software engineering) to really come of age, and the fundamental architecture of PGP also leaves no room for now critical concepts like forward secrecy.

All of this baggage has been distilled into a ballooning penumbra of OpenPGP specifications and notes so prolific that the entire picture is almost impossible to grasp. Even projects that are engaged in the process of writing a simplified experience on top of GPG suffer from this legacy: Mailpile had to write 1400 lines of python code just to interface with a native GnuPG installation for basic operations, and it still isn’t rock solid.

What we have

Today, journalists use GPG to communicate with sources securely, activists use it to coordinate world wide, and software companies use it to help secure their infrastructure. Some really heroic people have put in an enormous amount of effort to get us here, at substantial personal cost, and with little support.

Looking forward, however, I think of GPG as a glorious experiment that has run its course. The journalists who depend on it struggle with it and often mess up (“I send you the private key to communicate privately, right?”), the activists who use it do so relatively sparingly (“wait, this thing wants my finger print?”), and no other sane person is willing to use it by default. Even the projects that attempt to use it as a dependency struggle.

These are deep structural problems. GPG isn’t the thing that’s going to take us to ubiquitous end to end encryption, and if it were, it’d be kind of a shame to finally get there with 1990’s cryptography. If there’s any good news, it’s that GPG’s minimal install base means we aren’t locked in to this madness, and can start fresh with a different design philosophy. When we do, let’s use GPG as a warning for our new experiments, and remember that “innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1000 things.”

In the 1990s, I was excited about the future, and I dreamed of a world where everyone would install GPG. Now I’m still excited about the future, but I dream of a world where I can uninstall it.

The National Security Agency is losing its top talent at a worrisome rate as highly skilled personnel, some disillusioned with the spy service’s leadership and an unpopular reorganization, take higher-paying, more flexible jobs in the private sector.

Since 2015, the NSA has lost several hundred hackers, engineers and data scientists, according to current and former U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter. The potential impact on national security is significant, they said.

Headquartered at Fort Meade in Maryland, the NSA employs a civilian workforce of about 21,000 there and is the largest producer of intelligence among the nation’s 17 spy agencies. The people who have left were responsible for collecting and analyzing the intelligence that goes into the president’s daily briefing. Their work also included monitoring a broad array of subjects including the Islamic State, Russian and North Korean hackers, and analyzing the intentions of foreign governments, and they were responsible for protecting the classified networks that carry such sensitive information.

“Some synonym of the word ‘epidemic’ is the best way to describe it,” said Ellison Anne Williams, a former senior researcher at the NSA who left in 2016 to start her own data-security firm, Enveil. More than 10 of her employees also came from the NSA, she said. “The agency is losing an amazing amount of its strongest technical talent, and to lose your best and brightest staff is a huge hit.”

[Departing NSA veterans catch the eye of Silicon Valley investors]

The NSA would not disclose how many job vacancies it has. Agency officials said there is a 5.6 percent attrition rate among personnel who specialize in science, technology and math. The attrition rate is closer to 8 or 9 percent among hackers and those who staff the agency’s always-operating watch center monitoring for cyber attacks, a trend that has spanned the Obama and Trump administrations.

Although the departure rates are low, compared with attrition levels in the civilian technology industry, and although the agency is filling its vacancies, most new personnel lack the experience of those who have left, said one senior intelligence official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer candid insights about the secretive organization. That experience deficit can impede the NSA’s core mission of collecting and analyzing the masses of data the agency lifts from foreign networks.

Some groups within the NSA have lost almost half of their staffs, one former official said. As a result, projects ­to make intelligence collection more effective­ have been cut or slowed.

It is a turbulent moment in the NSA’s 65-year history. The agency continues to face public distrust after revelations, made by former contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, about the scope of its surveillance of American citizens. Morale dipped in the aftermath of those disclosures and has not fully recovered. More recently, the workforce was rattled by a series of breaches targeting the agency’s highly sensitive hacking tools.

[NSA officials worried about the day its potent hacking tool would get loose. Then it did.]

Another source of frustration is an ongoing reorganization that has merged the NSA’s highly secret electronic spying mission with its more public network-defense operation, along with other changes. NSA Director Michael S. Rogers, a Navy admiral who also oversees the military’s Cyber Command, launched NSA 21 to break down what he called the “walls of granite” among divisions whose missions, he believed, complement one another.

Former employees have voiced a variety of complaints. Some say they feel their missions have been marginalized by the restructuring. One called the reorganization “an enormous distraction” and lamented what he characterized as an inefficient procurement process that made it difficult to obtain even simple open-source developer tools. Another faulted the agency’s pay structure and promotion system, saying it favors seniority over skill and competence.

A series of breaches beginning with Snowden and including the arrest of former contractor Harold T. Martin III in 2016 have led to new security precautions. Such restrictions on accessing data have made work more difficult, and the internal hunt for would-be leakers has contributed to an environment of suspicion, said a number of current and former employees.

“It comes down to death by a thousand cuts,” said a former employee, adding that people “tend to quit in packs. One person hits their breaking point, and once they leave, the dominoes start falling.”

[NSA contractor thought to have taken classified material the old-fashioned way]

The brain drain has been so pronounced that at one gathering in 2016 of the agency’s elite hacking division, one individual raised the concern with Rogers directly. According to several people familiar with the exchange, Rogers disputed that there was any increase in attrition and told his employees that they should stop complaining and get back to work.

An NSA spokesman, Tommy Groves, did not challenge the account, saying that employees’ concerns about high attrition rates have led to changes, including increased pay, increased promotions and greater opportunities to work at all NSA sites.

Rogers did not respond to a request for comment. More recently, though, he has made it a point in public to thank the agency’s workforce and acknowledge the “cultural challenge” its employees face. At a national security conference in September, for instance, he said that dealing with “the great men and women of the organization” is “the best part of the day for me.”

He added: “If the price of security becomes that we drive away the very men and women that generate value in the first place, we now have a self-induced mission kill.”

Rogers has told colleagues he plans to retire in the spring, ending a four-year tenure that has been rocky at times. At one point in 2016, the defense secretary and director of national intelligence wanted him removed over various leadership concerns.Rogers survived the episode, and with Trump’s national security team still settling in, he was seen as an element of continuity at the agency.

It is not clear whom President Trump will nominate to succeed him, but whoever steps into the role will face a variety of challenges.

“NSA is at this moment experiencing stress that is constant and unrelenting,” one former senior intelligence official said. He said the agency has weathered other high-anxiety periods “because there was cohesion in the workforce and a leader who could nurture them through it, if not inspire them. But this director hasn’t chosen to do that.”

Skilled personnel have always left the NSA, in particular to work for defense contractors that support its work, said Deputy Director George Barnes, who has been at the agency for 31 years. “The big change these days is there’s a supply-demand imbalance between the outside and the inside,” he told The Washington Post.

Barnes defended Rogers’s leadership and his handling of the reorganization. Rogers, he said, “is totally focused on ‘What’s the culture? How do we understand what causes stress?’ It’s the antithesis of the negative vibe” about which some employees complained.

Barnes also noted the allure of Silicon Valley and other cities that tech start-ups call home. The U.S. private sector is struggling to fill more than 270,000 jobs in cybersecurity, according to Burning Glass Technologies, a labor analytics firm. Total compensation for those jobs can reach $200,000 or more, meaning even relatively junior cyber professionals in the industry can make more than top officials at the NSA.

Some senior officials say that the outflow in part reflects a cultural shift in which millennials are not inclined to stay in one workplace for an entire career. And it also stems from a disproportionate number of retirements of people who entered the agency in the 1980s during a hiring boom.

Other former NSA personnel who have left or retired recently expressed confidence that the NSA would weather the storm.

“Yes, people will leave, but there are things you can do there that you can’t do anywhere else. It’s for God and country,” said Daniel Ennis, who oversaw the agency’s threat operations center before retiring in 2015 after 33 years. He now leads advanced cyberthreat intelligence for BlueteamGlobal, a private cybersecurity firm.

“NSA always recovers,” Ennis said.

On the last day of his life, Gary Benefield expressed hope for the future. He was finally about to “get right,” he said.

A Harley-riding tough guy and retired utility worker, Mr. Benefield had let addiction get the better of him. He was downing a dozen Budweisers a day and smoking nonstop, despite needing an oxygen tank to breathe. But that July day in 2010, he was headed to A Better Tomorrow, a California treatment center promising 24-hour care while he got sober.

Mr. Benefield was about to join the millions of Americans who have placed their fate in the hands of the nation’s sprawling, haphazardly regulated addiction-treatment industry. It is a wildly profitable business, thanks in large part to addicts like Gary.

He kissed his wife, Kelly, goodbye at the tiny airport in Show Low, Ariz., a town named for the lucky turn of a playing card more than a century earlier. “He told me he loved me,” she said later. That evening, he checked in at the treatment center.

The next morning, as dawn broke over A Better Tomorrow’s postage-stamp lawn and stucco walls, two new voice mail messages awaited an employee there.

One came from Kelly Benefield, asking: Could someone help her bring Gary a cake that day? It was his 53rd birthday.

The other came from a manager: Gary Benefield was dead.

America is convulsed by an addiction crisis — painkillers, heroin, alcoholism, meth — and its victims die with tragic regularity. But Mr. Benefield’s case is extraordinary.

His death in July 2010 kicked off a six-year battle that very nearly brought down one of the biggest addiction-treatment companies in the country, an epic clash between an addiction-treatment multimillionaire and a college kid and budding financial wizard.

On one side was Michael Cartwright, a former addict pursuing his dream of building a nationwide empire of trustworthy drug-treatment clinics — a kind of Mayo Clinic for addiction. His Nashville, Tenn., company owned the clinic where Mr. Benefield had died.

On the other was Chris Drose, who, uninspired by his class work at Furman University, became fascinated with short selling — a risky investment strategy of trying to make money by betting that a company’s stock will fall.

In Mr. Cartwright’s company, the college junior saw a very big “short.” And he attacked.

Addiction treatment is one of the most lucrative health care industries to emerge in a generation, a massive business fed by a national addiction crisis that, by most measures, is out of control. Drug overdoses kill more Americans than car accidents, but only a fraction of the country’s 23 million addicts go into rehab, creating an untapped market — and an enormous business opportunity.

Yet the industry focused on curing addiction has its shortcomings. One of the most significant: There is little consensus on the most effective ways to treat patients.

Should patients travel far from home, as Mr. Benefield did, to isolate them from temptation? Or should they stay close to their support networks of family and friends? Should they be treated with medications that reduce the appetite for opioids? Or should they be coached to conquer their illness through willpower?

The field is also covered by a patchwork of regulations that haven’t kept pace with its growth. That has created room for opportunistic small operators to spring up, some with questionable track records.

The industry started taking off when President George W. Bush in 2008 signed a law requiring insurers to pay for rehab. The 2010 Affordable Care Act expanded coverage further. Suddenly just about anyone with insurance could get help.

Today, private insurance covers treatment for millions of working and middle-class Americans. Annual spending by private insurers on opiate addiction alone rose more than 1,000 percent in the five-year period ending in 2015, to roughly $721 million, according to Fair Health, an independent nonprofit that keeps a database of private insurance claims.

Mr. Cartwright’s company, American Addiction Centers, operates treatment centers in eight states around the country. That was how Mr. Benefield ended up in a treatment facility in California: Eager to get sober, he and his wife searched online from their home in Arizona for a clinic, found A Better Tomorrow — which eventually became part of Mr. Cartwright’s business — and then called up to book a spot.

This account of Mr. Benefield’s final days, and the battle over American Addiction Centers, draws on interviews with executives, front-line employees, addicts, police and investors, as well as thousands of court documents.

On October 3, 2014 — four years after Mr. Benefield’s death — Michael Cartwright and his business partner, Jerrod Menz, rang the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange to announce the first of day trading in their company’s shares. Mr. Cartwright, standing next to his teenage daughter, clapped. Mr. Menz gave the thumbs up.

At the close of trading that day, shares in American Addiction Centers held by the two men — the two largest shareholders — were worth a combined $202 million.

It was a crowning achievement for both men, but particularly for Mr. Cartwright, who had started his career running a rehab center for mentally ill addicts in inner city Nashville.

In 2012, Mr. Cartwright started buying up smaller providers, including one that had been started by Mr. Menz, his longtime friend, in Southern California, and assembling them into a national chain.

Mr. Cartwright himself had abused drugs as a younger man, “anything I could get my hands on,” he said in an interview. Mr. Cartwright also spent time in a psychiatric hospital after a breakdown, an experience that helped to shape his belief that anyone can overcome addiction as long as they have the right mind-set.

He credited his grandmother’s tough love with helping him turn his life around. “She wasn’t about to let me wallow in my own poop,” he wrote in his book, “Believable Hope.”

Addiction should be overcome by willpower and hard work in therapy, Mr. Cartwright said. Other treatment providers put more emphasis on medicines to help addicts — particularly opiate addicts — function in the long term.

The treatment world is split by methodology and motivation — inpatient and outpatient, religious and secular, nonprofit and moneymaking. Such a Balkanized industry seemed ripe for consolidation by a businessman like Mr. Cartwright.

With aggressive internet marketing and a central call center, Mr. Cartwright pulled in patients from around the country. Patients stay for weeks at a time in a treatment house, undergoing therapy paid for by private insurance.

“If you can create a great brand, which I think Michael can,” said Lucius Burch III, an early investor in American Addiction Centers and a former chairman of a Nashville company that runs private prisons, “you have an opportunity to build a huge company.”

But there were people who believed they saw big vulnerabilities in that emerging brand, including a college student in South Carolina.

With bushy eyebrows and a boyish face, Mr. Drose comes from a family of skeptics and crusaders. His grandfather helped plot the assassination of Rafael Trujillo, a dictator in his native Dominican Republic, in the 1960s.

He remembered the day, in late 2014, that he discovered the investment idea that would launch his career. He was 19, sitting on a purple armchair in his dorm room at Furman, where he liked to spend his spare time scanning financial filings in search of stocks to “short,” or bet against.

“It’s like a big Easter egg hunt,” Mr. Drose said recently. “Except, for something bad.”

That day, one company stood out to him — American Addiction Centers. In just a few months in existence as a publicly traded stock, its shares had risen a blistering 60 percent.

Any time a stock rises that quickly, short sellers like Mr. Drose sense an opportunity. But there was something else that piqued his interest.

A business that profited from people’s desperation seemed like “an industry that might have something weird going on,” Mr. Drose said.

But weird wouldn’t begin to describe the world he was about to enter.

Culling through American Addiction Centers’ public filings, he noticed that a health insurer had sued one of the company’s subsidiaries, claiming that it had conducted unnecessary drug tests on patients’ urine. Posing as a prospective patient, Mr. Drose called the company and asked how often it conducted drug tests, and came to believe that American Addiction Centers was testing much more frequently than other providers.

He wrote an article about his findings on a website called Seeking Alpha, which short sellers frequent for investment tips. The company’s stock promptly dropped 10 percent.

That was a big win for anyone short-selling the stock. Short sellers borrow shares in a company, then sell them hoping that the price falls. Their goal is to buy back the shares later, at a cheaper price, and return them to the lender. The price decline is their profit.

In Nashville, Mr. Cartwright watched his stock fall, and was stunned. “We found no substantiation for any one of his claims,” he said in an interview, referring to Mr. Drose’s article.

Battle lines were being drawn and Mr. Drose’s work was attracting attention elsewhere. Kingsford Capital, a hedge fund based outside of San Francisco, hired him as a consultant and told him to keep digging into the treatment business.

And another interested party had noticed Mr. Drose’s work, too: a man named Charles Hill, who ran a treatment center in Temecula, Calif., the town where Mr. Benefield had died.

Mr. Hill told Mr. Drose that he knew a great deal about American Addiction Centers. He congratulated him on his article about the urine testing, and suggested he start searching for lawsuits brought by families of patients who had died in California. “You’ve been looking in the wrong place,” he told Mr. Drose.

Following Mr. Hill’s advice, Mr. Drose flew to California in the spring of 2015. He may have been working for a major hedge fund, but he was so young — still only 20 — that he had to pay extra to rent a car.

The two men met at Mr. Hill’s rehab center in Temecula, a maze of cul-de-sacs and shopping plazas book-ended by the velvet green Santa Rosa mountains and the snowcapped peaks of the San Bernardino range.

Mr. Hill thought the college kid was an investigative reporter. So he was thrilled to have someone to listen to his concerns about the treatment business.

“I didn’t even know what short selling was,” Mr. Hill recalled.

Standing five feet seven inches in scuffed leather boots and faded jeans, Mr. Hill is a former painkiller addict and a natural storyteller. The story that perhaps best defines his life involved a football injury back in the 1990s. It shaped his personal philosophy of drug treatment, one that puts its trust in modern medications — and is at odds with people like Mr. Cartwright, who want patients to ultimately lead a truly drug-free life.

Mr. Hill was injured at the age of 42, too old to be playing tackle football. But eager to relive his high school glory days, Mr. Hill — his nickname is Rocky — had joined some friends to start a full-contact football league, The Over the Hill Pigskin Shootout. They used old pads donated by the Los Angeles Rams.

One fateful tackle, though, ended the fun. He tore the rotator cuff in each of his shoulders. His doctor prescribed a powerful painkiller, Norco.

And Mr. Hill — who was already in the addiction treatment business — became an opiate addict himself.

When he tried to stop taking the Norco, his life unraveled. He couldn’t sleep. He subsisted on Ensure, the nutrition drink, because eating made him vomit. He considered suicide.

A doctor specializing in pain management told Mr. Hill that the opiates had permanently altered his brain. Therapy and group meetings couldn’t fix that.

The doctor prescribed Mr. Hill a different drug, buprenorphine, which satisfies the craving for opiates but does not result in a high. Minutes after the first dose dissolved under Mr. Hill’s tongue, the world righted itself.

“Before, it felt like someone had put a vacuum in me and sucked out all the joy,” Mr. Hill said. “And then, it was like someone had suddenly reversed it.”

Mr. Hill’s successful treatment with buprenorphine was for him a revelation. Today, he sends the opiate addicts he treats to a local doctor for a prescription for the same drug he still takes every morning.

For many addicts, that prescription is all they need to get on with their lives, Mr. Hill said. Mr. Cartwright, by contrast, believes that ultimately “abstinence has to be the goal,” he said in an interview.

That is only the start of their differences.

Mr. Cartwright’s company specializes in enrolling addicts in intensive inpatient programs, often far from their families — where they stay full-time in a sober living center with other recovering addicts.

Mr. Hill prefers an outpatient approach that is close to the patient’s support network. During the day, addicts come to Mr. Hill’s two-story building, where they meet with therapists. At night, they go home.

Mr. Hill believes the inpatient model is motivated more by greed than doing good. Inpatient providers can bill insurers up to $10,000 for 28 days of services; Mr. Hill charges $1,400 a month for his outpatient treatments.

There is great debate about which treatment approaches work best, and even how to measure their efficacy.

“A lot of organizations say they have the cure, but they have no incentive to try to prove it through the data,” said Robert Poznanovich, executive director of Business Development at Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, one of the best-known addiction-treatment providers in the United States.

Hazelden offers a mix of outpatient and inpatient treatment. Modern addiction treatment grew directly from Hazelden and its secluded farm in Minnesota. In 1949, a group of businessmen and a Catholic priest pioneered the idea of bringing alcoholics to a rural location, where the men (they were all men back then) could focus on the 12-step principles without the distractions and temptations of everyday life.

The approach became known as the Minnesota Model and was copied by other nonprofits for decades. Then, the new insurance laws in 2008 and 2010 transformed what had largely been a government-funded and charitable-minded field into an enticing for-profit business. In just a few years, that gave rise to a $35 billion industry of inpatient programs such as the one offered by American Addiction Centers.

Mr. Hill’s concerns about American Addiction Centers were not just about the debate between inpatient vs. outpatient philosophies of treatment. He told Mr. Drose about patients who had died in rehab homes around Temecula and nearby Murrieta that Mr. Cartwright later acquired.

The deaths, Mr. Hill contended, showed how the company was unequipped to deal with medically fragile addicts. Yet, Mr. Hill claimed that for years the company kept taking those patients, assuring them that they would receive adequate care.

As far back as 2008, Mr. Hill had told the California agency that oversees drug-treatment programs that he believed some patients at Mr. Menz’s facilities (ones that later became part of American Addiction Centers) were in danger. When some of the dead patients’ families later filed lawsuits against those companies, he followed every twist and turn of the cases.

He had also spent a good part of 2011 and 2012 working with Hardy Gold, a prosecutor in the state attorney general’s office who was interested in Mr. Benefield’s death. The two began trading emails discussing aspects of the investigation — emails that would later cause headaches for the prosecutor. At one point, Mr. Gold visited Mr. Hill’s office to get a tutorial on the addiction-treatment industry.

During that time, American Addiction Centers sued Mr. Hill for defamation, saying he had made false statements about its patient care. A judge dismissed the suit.

Mr. Hill kept up his attacks on American Addiction Centers. And in Mr. Drose, he believed that he had found a new way to take on the company.

Mr. Drose spent hours talking to Mr. Hill that day in Temecula. When he returned home, his backpack was stuffed with lawsuits, depositions and autopsy reports. “Damn,” Mr. Drose said he thought at the time. “I left there thinking I had stumbled across a gold mine.”

Mr. Drose returned to Kingsford’s offices in Atlanta, took over a glass-enclosed conference room, and made piles of documents related to each death.

None of the deaths had been disclosed to investors when the stock of American Addiction Centers began trading publicly.

The dead included Shaun Reyna, an alcoholic, who killed himself with a shaving razor in one of the company’s treatment houses. Mr. Reyna’s widow said in a 2014 lawsuit that the staff had ignored signs that her husband was suffering withdrawal symptoms that required urgent medical care. The case is expected to go to trial early in 2018.

There was also Gregory Thomas, who hanged himself from a bridge one block from the company’s main office in Temecula in November 2010. He had been brought to the office by a company employee, but never went through with the treatment.

Mr. Thomas’s body hung from a bridge for several days before anyone noticed. A judge ruled that the company wasn’t liable because Mr. Thomas had not been admitted.

But the circumstances of Mr. Benefield’s death, as detailed in a lawsuit his wife brought in 2011, stood out.

The treatment house that he ended up traveling to, A Better Tomorrow, was founded by Mr. Menz, Mr. Cartwright’s partner in American Addiction Centers. It would become a core part of the publicly traded company.

When Mr. Benefield called A Better Tomorrow in late July 2010, he was about to help the company solve a problem: a patient shortage.

There were too many empty beds, Mr. Menz had told his staff members at a monthly meeting, and they needed to fill them. The employees — who referred to signing up new patients as “closing a sale” — understood the risk of failure.

“If you’re not closing,” Jody Brueske, the former sales representative who enrolled Mr. Benefield would later testify in a separate case involving his death, “you’re going to be the next one walking out the door.”

From their kitchen in Springersville, Ariz., the Benefields did not know any of that. All they knew was that A Better Tomorrow had come up in an internet search. A former snowboarder, Mr. Benefield was so excited he even packed his gym clothes, thrilled at the prospect of getting healthy again, according to court records. Ms. Benefield declined to be interviewed; her statements primarily come from court documents.

From his first phone call to his death, Mr. Benefield’s relationship with A Better Tomorrow lasted a mere two days. Compressed into those 48 hours is a case study in how financial pressures and business motivations can collide with the needs and expectations of the fragile patients who represent the industry’s bread and butter.

Just days after the staff meeting led by Mr. Menz, Ms. Brueske took the call from Mr. Benefield and his wife, Kelly. His case was pretty typical — an out-of-control drinking problem that was hurting someone’s marriage. But one thing set it apart: Mr. Benefield had chronic lung disease that forced him to use an oxygen tank.

Ms. Brueske had never dealt with a patient who used oxygen. But she felt that she couldn’t turn anyone away, because much of her pay came from commissions, she later testified.

According to a court transcript, a lawyer grilled Ms. Brueske on that point, asking her: “Did you feel personally pressured to get more clients in because of that sales meeting?”

Ms. Brueske responded, “Yes.”

Ultimately, Ms. Brueske assured the Benefields that A Better Tomorrow could provide the oxygen he needed.

In an interview, Mr. Cartwright disputed the sales rep’s testimony. He said that her perception of the pressures to fill beds “did not match reality.” He said the company would never promise to provide oxygen to a patient, because it would require a prescription. “If she promised that, she was out there on an island,” he said.

But from the moment Mr. Benefield stepped off the plane in California, there were signs the company wasn’t equipped to handle his care.

A Better Tomorrow sent a driver to pick him up at the San Diego airport. When that driver, a recovering meth addict with no medical training, got to the airport, he found that Mr. Benefield was having trouble breathing. His oxygen tank was empty.

The driver’s supervisor instructed him to give Mr. Benefield a sedative called Serax, even though Mr. Benefield had not been prescribed that drug. According to a transcript of court testimony, the Serax pills were leftovers from previous patients that were simply kept in the car in case the driver needed to administer a sedative on the spot.

Mr. Menz, in an interview, said it had never been company policy to dispense drugs without a prescription, nor did the company keep leftover medicine.

The driver and other employees also testified that staff members were discouraged from taking patients to a hospital emergency room — even when they appeared to be in distress — because A Better Tomorrow might risk losing a paying customer. The feeling was, “they are taking our clients,” the driver said of the hospital.

The treatment house where Mr. Benefield was taken was not a medical facility but a five-bedroom home with a two-car garage and a hot tub in the back. And the employees there did not know what to make of Mr. Benefield’s behavior — they were familiar with addiction symptoms, not respiratory ailments.

The afternoon of Mr. Benefield’s arrival, as he grew more distressed, the house’s employees called their managers at home for guidance. One supervisor they phoned — a licensed massage therapist and marriage counselor, not a doctor — told them to administer more sedatives.

Mr. Benefield’s oxygen tank remained unfilled.

That night, the employees found that Mr. Benefield had slid out of bed and was sitting on the floor. They hoisted him back into bed. When they went to check on him again in the morning, he was dead.

As part of the testimony by Ms. Brueske, the sales rep who worked with the Benefields, she described her boss’s advice after she learned of the death of her client. “You need to get thicker skin,” she recalled her saying. “People die in rehab all of the time.”

Mr. Drose said that he wasn’t sure what to think after he reviewed the testimony and other documents. “I’ve seen companies screw over shareholders,” Mr. Drose said. “This company seemed like it was hurting people.”

But despite piles of documents detailing tragic deaths, it wasn’t clear to him that he had enough useful material to move the stock price down, which remained his ultimate goal. After all, addiction patients die with tragic regularity.

Mr. Drose’s boss at Kingsford Capital, the hedge fund where he was working, also wasn’t sure what all the material added up to.

“This seems like a lot of stuff,” Mr. Drose said his boss had told him as he stood among his piles of documents in the summer of 2015. “But what is really in here?”

A spokesman for Kingsford said the “firm does not comment on its investments.”

Bit by bit, Mr. Drose struggled to piece together the meaning of the deaths at American Addiction Centers.

He determined — after filtering through the reams of legal filings and other documents he had collected — that the prosecutor, Mr. Gold, had taken an interest in Mr. Benefield’s case. After speaking with a former police detective about what the possible charges against the company could be, he came up with a startling theory: The company could face a murder charge.

It was a wild idea. No other public company in California history had been charged with murder.

In California, second-degree murder involves someone acting with “implied” malice that reflects an “abandoned or malignant heart.” While that might sound like a legal concept straight out of Edgar Allan Poe, the theory was that the employees who gave Mr. Benefield sedatives, instead of taking him to the hospital, may have acted with implied malice.

Mr. Drose liked the sound of that. “Second-degree murder is what will destroy this company,” Mr. Drose wrote in an email to Mr. Hill. “I am sure of it.”

On and off in the years since Mr. Benefield’s death, a cast of characters — the empire builder Mr. Cartwright, the budding short-seller Mr. Drose, the crosstown rival Mr. Hill — had made A Better Tomorrow and American Addiction Centers a focus of their lives. Some hoped to build it up. Others dreamed of tearing it down.

Mr. Cartwright and Mr. Drose, in particular, saw fortunes to be made.

But in Mr. Benefield’s death, would a company — and by extension, an industry — be held to account? Would future patients benefit from the lessons learned from his death?

On July 21, 2015, a prosecutor charged a subsidiary of American Addiction Centers and four employees with second-degree murder in the Benefield case.

The company’s stock price fell 53 percent, erasing more than half its value in just one day.

Mr. Cartwright, vacationing in Italy, didn’t know what hit him. He called his board of directors to ask for help figuring out what to do.

One board member, the Nashville investor Mr. Burch, recently recalled his advice to Mr. Cartwright. “You can’t run away from it,” Mr. Burch told him. “There is not much you can do if someone calls you a son of a bitch, other than deny it and prove you are not. You get all the bullets you can, and fire at the enemy as quickly as you can.”

That’s exactly what Mr. Cartwright did.

First his company lawyers argued, among other things, that the official coroner’s report said Mr. Benefield had died of natural causes, but the prosecutor had relied on paid testimony from a different coroner to make a case for homicide. The lawyers got the murder charge reduced to abuse.

That was a big win. But Mr. Cartwright was just getting started.

“How do you bring a murder charge on a five-year-old, natural-cause death?” Mr. Cartwright said recently. “It makes no sense.”

Looking for answers, two private investigators were sent to interview Mr. Drose in Atlanta. Only then did Mr. Cartwright discover how all his enemies fit together.

Mr. Drose said that he had guessed that a murder charge might be coming — well before the actual charge was made public.

This gave Mr. Cartwright powerful new ammunition in his court battle: He didn’t believe Mr. Drose had merely guessed. He suspected someone had leaked confidential grand jury information to an investor in a position to make a financial killing.

“I think the charge was brought to make money,” Mr. Cartwright said in the interview earlier this year. “Can I prove it? No.”

Presented with that argument, the judge said that Mr. Gold, the prosecutor, appeared to have a conflict because of his relationship with Mr. Hill, but that it was not enough to unfairly influence the case. But by then, it was June 2016, almost six years since Mr. Benefield’s death. Two key witnesses had died and the case was running out of steam. Ultimately, American Addiction Centers agreed to pay a $200,000 fine and allow a monitor to oversee its operations in California.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for the California attorney general’s office emphasized that “the judge concluded that any connection between Mr. Gold and Mr. Hill did not create a likelihood of unfairness to the defendants in the case.”

The unprecedented murder case against a company, which would have sent a message to American Addiction Centers — and, by extension a desperately needed but poorly understood industry — had fizzled out.

Today, Mr. Cartwright is still angry that his company had to fight off what he considers an unfair attack. The stock price is hovering around a quarter of its peak value, diminishing his personal wealth.

But American Addiction Centers is growing again. In September, it bought a treatment company with a 114-bed hospital in Massachusetts. As part of the deal, it also acquired several toll-free numbers to generate referrals, including 1-800-ALCOHOL.

And he points out that while the care at American Addiction Centers has evolved since Mr. Benefield’s death, the resulting court fight did not prompt him to alter his treatment practices. “Why would I change policies and procedure because of someone dying of a heart attack at 3 o’clock in the morning?” he said.

His persistent critic, Mr. Hill, worries about what he considers the industry’s sorry state and the quality of addiction treatment. “It is going to take turning the field upside down,” he said. But he has also moved on, buying a place in Mexico where he enjoys swimming with dolphins. One day he hopes to retire there.

Christopher Drose’s work earned him a spot on Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30” list of up-and-coming young investors. Today he works for a new hedge fund in New York doing what he loves: digging up dirt on companies, and betting against them.

“Some part of me likes to see people who are not telling the truth come face to face with it,” Mr. Drose said. “I’ve found a way to express that with stocks.”

American Addiction Centers has estimated that short sellers walked away with $250 million because of Mr. Benefield’s death and the murder charge against the company. Mr. Drose called that number overstated but declined to say how much money he made.

In 2015, Kingsford Capital sent out a holiday letter detailing its investment successes, which mentioned the murder charge involving American Addiction Centers. In the letter, the firm summed up its strategy that year as finding “gifts from garbage.”

“One man’s trash,” Kingsford Capital wrote, “is our treasure.”

Today in America, overdoses claim more lives than guns. Yet as the addiction crisis deepens, patients and their families are still struggling to sort out the most effective forms of treatment offered by the sprawling industry.

Mr. Benefield, a bear of a man with a big drinking problem, had pursued his hope of getting well. His wife, Kelly, was left to settle a civil wrongful-death lawsuit against the company that they had hoped would help him.

On Facebook, years after he died, Ms. Benefield wrote, “I miss him so much.”

II. WHY WE MUST SAVE THE SUBWAY

The subway has been saved before, and the man who saved it was Richard Ravitch. Stocky, white-haired and gruff, Ravitch, now 84, is the type of civic macher you don’t see much anymore, an urban idealist who has spent his career moving back and forth between the public and private sectors. His grandfather fled the pogroms in Russia, and — classic New York story — created a successful construction business from nothing. He lost everything in the Depression, and then his son, Ravitch’s father, made his name building apartment buildings on Central Park West.

Ravitch followed his father into the real estate business. In the 1960s, he served on President Lyndon Johnson’s National Commission on Urban Problems, and in 1973, after 12 years of trying, he completed Waterside, a $78 million, 1,470-unit development for low-and-middle-income families on the East River, just south of the United Nations. A couple of years later, Ravitch played a critical role in rescuing New York City from its fiscal crisis, helping to persuade the teachers’ union to invest $150 million of its pension fund in a new series of city bonds. And in 1979, he was named chairman of the M.T.A.

Ravitch didn’t need the job or even really want it. He waived his salary and took to wearing a bulletproof vest in public after someone threatening to kill him shot an M.T.A. police officer at his office. But he was a child of the New Deal and a passionate believer in the subway, which at the time was in even worse shape than it is today.

During the fiscal crisis, drastic funding cuts had spun the subway into a downward spiral of deteriorating tracks, malfunctioning cars, increasing crime and falling ridership, a steep decline that tracked the city’s own postindustrial collapse. To reverse the trend, Ravitch prepared a detailed breakdown of the costs of repairing and replacing all of the system’s outdated equipment and proposed a sweeping plan to help fund the work. He argued at the time: “The transit situation, though lacking the drama of imminent bankruptcy, represents an equally grave threat to our economy, the social equilibrium and the survival of the greatest city in the world.”

The subway’s importance to the city begins with a single, durable economic principle: Cities create density, and density creates growth. Economists call the phenomenon agglomeration. Not only does geographical proximity reduce costs, but it also facilitates the exchange of knowledge and spurs innovation. It’s a principle that holds true for better and worse and regardless of the industry. The free-market economist Edward Glaeser has pointed out that the junk bonds and leveraged buyouts of ’70s and ’80s Wall Street were as much the product of human collaboration as they were of corporate greed. The urban-planning professor Elizabeth Currid-Halkett coined the phrase “the Warhol economy” to describe how this same sort of cross-fertilization and idea-sharing works in New York’s art, fashion and music worlds. As industries grow, they attract and create new, connected ones: Book publishers beget book agents, tech start-ups beget venture-capital firms and so on. It all begins with the ability to pack large numbers of people into small spaces and then unpack them at the end of the day. Without the subway, this process breaks down, and the city dissipates.

Ravitch took his case to editorial boards and legislative leaders. But there was a problem. No one wanted new taxes. So Ravitch cold-called David Rockefeller, the longtime head of Chase Manhattan Bank. “I said, ‘Mr. Rockefeller, this is an audacious request, but would you get up at 5 in the morning and let me show you the subway system?’ ” he told me one afternoon in his office at Waterside. “And he said yes.” Ravitch then suggested that Rockefeller bring along the chairman of MetLife and the president of AT&T. All three went and saw the dirty, graffiti-scarred system firsthand. As Ravitch tells the story, that was all it took: Rockefeller called the majority leader of the State Senate and told him to “give Ravitch what he needs.” The tax package passed, and Ravitch ultimately raised $7.7 billion — more than $17 billion in today’s dollars — much of which was spent replacing cars, refurbishing stations and increasing maintenance.

The turnaround was not immediate. A year after Ravitch’s tax plan was enacted, annual subway ridership dropped below one billion. But before long, as the system gradually became safer, more reliable and less unsavory, it started to trend up. By 2015, ridership had hit 1.7 billion, a level not seen since the late 1940s.

The rejuvenation of the subway has been intertwined with a protracted period of staggering economic prosperity — agglomeration at work. New York rebuilt the subway, and the subway rebuilt the city. It was one of the great urban renaissance stories of our modern era. But now that the city is thriving, it faces another challenge, perhaps an even greater one: how to spread this staggering wealth more evenly. The subway might again be a central part of the solution.

If the story of the subway is the story of density, it is also the story of land — and more to the point, the story of land value. Before the first tracks had even been laid, real estate speculators were gobbling up farmland and empty lots along the proposed route and then quickly flipping their parcels at huge premiums to builders. When the subway recovered from its last major crisis, it again began throwing off enormous returns for the owners of the land above it. From 1993 to 2013, the average price for a co-op or condo in TriBeCa rose from $182 per square foot to $1,569. In the process, prime real estate in Manhattan was transformed from a place where people lived and built businesses into a high-yield investment in which absentee owners parked their money and watched it grow.

As Manhattan’s business-district centers became denser and its scarce real estate more expensive, the growth started to spill out, following the subway’s snaking lines across the river, into Brooklyn and Queens. “Developers build things where the subway works, and we build far fewer things where it doesn’t,” Jed Walentas, the 43-year-old principal of the real estate development company Two Trees Management, told me recently over lunch at a cafe in Dumbo, Brooklyn’s answer to SoHo. “We put density where there’s transit.” Walentas, who was wearing the familiar Brooklyn uniform of jeans, New Balance sneakers and a blue hoodie, and his father, David, own a good chunk of Dumbo, an investment that has made them rich — house in the Hamptons, vacations heli-skiing — beyond the wildest dreams of most New Yorkers.

I’ve known Walentas since the early 2000s, when I rented a desk in one of his many buildings in the neighborhood, a turn-of-the-century factory that has since been converted into multimillion-dollar condominiums. This is pretty representative of Dumbo’s overall trajectory over the last two decades. It’s a stark transformation that would have been impossible to predict when his father first started buying up the neighborhood’s underutilized properties in the early 1980s, before it was widely known as Dumbo. What enabled it to happen wasn’t just the neighborhood’s excellent subway access — it’s sandwiched between the F line and the A line — or the city’s economic recovery, or even the exodus of rich people priced out of Manhattan by even richer people. The transformation of Dumbo required something much simpler: a change in the zoning law. For years, the neighborhood had been restricted to only manufacturing uses, a legacy of the city’s losing battle to retain industrial jobs in the 1960s. In the late ’90s, Walentas and his father were able to persuade the city to jettison these old rules and allow them to completely remake the neighborhood, filling old factories with loft apartments, design-and-tech-centric offices, retail stores, artists’ studios and new condo towers. In the subsequent 20 years, as the neighborhood changed, average condo prices rose from $200 per square foot to more than $1,500. More recently, Walentas has pushed north into Williamsburg, leveraging similar rezonings there to turn a former textile factory into the trendy Wythe Hotel (near the L train) and a 19th-century Domino sugar refinery (J, M and Z) into three million square feet of office space, retail stores, parks and apartments.

Like most good-government tools, zoning sounds boring, but it is in fact a secret means by which cities are shaped and fortunes are made. If the subway delivers density, zoning determines where that density goes by doing things like placing limits on how tall buildings can rise or how many dwellings they can contain. New York’s zoning codes are byzantine, the product of years of pushing and pulling between the desire to allow the city to evolve and grow and the impulse to keep development in check. These codes have helped preserve the city’s historic buildings and neighborhoods while preventing its streets from being forever cast into darkness by endless rows of skyscrapers. But they have also had the effect of restricting the supply of housing, which has driven up prices, especially in neighborhoods with desirable buildings and good subway access. “I rent studio apartments for $3,400 a month,” Walentas told me. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Click on one of the physics simulations below... you'll see them animating in real time, and be able to interact with them by dragging objects or changing parameters like gravity.

Customize and Share

There are several ways to reproduce a particular experimental setup. The easiest way is to click the "share" button.

1. Modify the simulation by changing parameters such as gravity, damping, and by dragging objects with your mouse.
2. Click the "share" button. Copy the URL from the dialog.
3. Paste the URL in an email. Or save it in a text file for later use.

When the recipient clicks the URL, the EasyScript that is embedded in the URL will replicate the conditions that you set up.

SeeCustomizing myPhysicsLab Simulations for how to customize further with JavaScript or EasyScript.

Open Source Software

myPhysicsLab is provided as open source software under theApache 2.0 License. Source code is available athttps://github.com/myphysicslab/myphysicslab. Online documentation is available.

There are around 50 different simulations in the source code, each of which has anexample file which is mainly for development and testing. These can also be used to show simulations offline (when not connected to the internet).

The example files are available online in two forms:

How Does It Work?

Most of the simulation web pages show how the math is derived. See for example theSingle Spring simulation.

• A physics simulation starts with a mathematical model whose variables define the state of the system at a given time. Each variable represents the position or velocity of some part of the system.
• The heart of a physics simulation is theset of differential equations that describe how the variables evolve over time. The forces and geometry determine the equations.
• The next step is getting the computer to solve the equations, a process that goes by the name numerical analysis. The Runge Kutta method is a popular choice.
• For simulations that involve collisions there are additional steps: we need to detect the collision and thenback up in time to the moment before the collision to modify the velocities.
• Finally, there are lots of programming details abouthow to represent objects on the computer display, how tohandle user input, how tosynchronize with real time, and so on.

The rigid body physics engine is the most sophisticated simulation shown here. It is capable of replicating all of the other more specialized simulations. The physics engine handlescollisions and also calculatescontact forces which allow objects to push against each other.

See also links to other physics websites.

Units Of Measurement

The myPhysicsLab simulations do not have units of measurements specified such as meters, kilograms, seconds. The units are dimensionless, they can be interpreted however you want, but they must be consistent within the simulation.

For example if we regard a unit of distance as one meter and a unit of time as one second, then a unit of velocity must be one meter/second.

See the discussionAbout Units Of Measurement in the myPhysicsLab Documentation.

E-Mail List

Stay informed about new myPhysicsLab simulations and software. Low volume of email. We won't share your email address with anyone else.

About the Author

Hi, my name is Erik Neumann, I live in Seattle, WA, USA, and I am a self-employed software engineer. I started developing this website in 2001, both as a personal project to learn scientific computing, and with a vision of developing an online science museum. I grew up in Chicago near theMuseum of Science and Industry which I loved to visit and learn about science and math.

I got a BA in Mathematics at Oberlin College, Ohio, 1978, and an MBA from Univerity of Chicago, 1984. My first software jobs were using the languageAPL which I enjoyed for its math-like conciseness and power.

I was fortunate to get involved in the Macintosh software industry early on in 1985, joiningMacroMind, which becameMacromedia. I led the software development at MacroMind as VP of Engineering for 5 years. Our most significant product was VideoWorks, which was renamed Director, and lives on today asAdobe Director. In the 1980's, the interactive multimedia concepts that are so common today were new and being developed. VideoWorks was mainly an animation tool, but also incorporated programmable interactivity. Our main competitors at that time were HyperCard, SuperCard, and Authorware. Director was used in many different ways; I am most proud that it became the preferred way to prototype software user interfaces for a time during the 90's. Director was also used to develop the introductory "guided tour" tutorial that came with the Macintosh in the early years. And of course, Director was used for all sorts of art, design, and marketing projects.

I went on to work at Apple Computer on new multimedia and user interface concepts involving digital agents, animated user interfaces, speech recognition and distributed information access. In 1991, there was a sudden flurry of activity when Apple and IBM were trying to set up a strategic partnership. I became involved in the super-secret negotiations, and made the suggestion that what the world needed was a standard for multimedia that multimedia content creators could rely on to publish to (ultimately this is what HTML became). Based on these suggestions,Kaleida Labs was founded. Our work there developed a product calledScriptX, which turned out to be very similar to Sun's Java which was being developed at the same time. ScriptX had goals of supporting all forms of multimedia: text, images, audio, video, animation; being cross-platform (Mac and Windows), interpreted, object oriented, with a garbage collector to manage memory.

I then moved to Seattle and turned my attention back to mathematics and science. I relearned calculus by doing all the problems in my old college text book and took further math classes at the University of Washington. I started developing this website as a way to practice what I was learning. I am now happy to use excellent tools such as HTML and JavaScript, and leave their development to others. I continue to work on physics simulations, with several new ones in development.

Archive of older projects.

This web page was first published April 2001.

This article/content was written by the individual writer identified and does not necessarily reflect the view of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company.

(Submitted on 2 Jan 2018)

Abstract: This document collects the lecture notes from my mini-course "Complexity Theory, Game Theory, and Economics," taught at the Bellairs Research Institute of McGill University, Holetown, Barbados, February 19--23, 2017, as the 29th McGill Invitational Workshop on Computational Complexity.
The goal of this mini-course is twofold: (i) to explain how complexity theory has helped illuminate several barriers in economics and game theory; and (ii) to illustrate how game-theoretic questions have led to new and interesting complexity theory, including recent several breakthroughs. It consists of two five-lecture sequences: the Solar Lectures, focusing on the communication and computational complexity of computing equilibria; and the Lunar Lectures, focusing on applications of complexity theory in game theory and economics. No background in game theory is assumed.

In just four months, high-doses of vitamin D reduce arterial stiffness in young, overweight/obese, vitamin-deficient, but otherwise still healthy African-Americans, researchers say.